Friday, August 15, 2014

Hot and Heavy

August 15th 2014

I have had some fan mail lately, a very nice thing for an author so insecure she can't even look at her reviews. One of the messages said that they really loved the book Veil Of Time, but sort of wished there had been more hot stuff.
Well, that is one of those issues that every author has to face and make a decision on. Some authors decide not to go into the hot zone at all, but frankly a book with no sex is to me like a dinner with no dessert - you just can't help feeling something is missing. And, Freud aside, sex is just so much a part of the human experience, how could you have 350 pages describing the lives of people without it? Diana Gabaldon in her Outlander series took the opposite tack and decided to put it in every other page, but that leaves me after a while feeling like shouting "Enough already!" It's just hard to write one good sex scene, let alone a hundred.

Then of course, there's the embarrassment. Pretty much your reader knows that you're going to draw on your own experience, so then you have your Great Aunt Theresa to think about, not to mention children. That's not a part of your experience you're gong to post on Facebook, if you have Facebook, which I don't. Because I am private. I keep myself to myself. Hence the question of sex in what I write is not a small issue.
So, my rule for literature is the same I hold up to sex in movies - if it moves the plot along and isn't gratuitous, then it should stay. People seem to allow for clicheed sex scenes in books much more readily than they allow for clichees in any other aspect of writing. In American films, the sex clichee that is acted out time and time again revolves around the saxophone, the clothes strewn up the stairs, the abandoned high heels, the sparse bedroom, the bodies moving under the covers. Why do people not object? It makes your eyes glaze over. You know what they mean, but it's not showing you anything about the characters.
Real sex isn't like that anyway - especially not with someone you have known for two hours, as is usually the case in movies. European films are better about this, and don't do that saxophone thing. The bodies tend to be real bodies; the action tends to come out of the characters.
That's what I strive for in my writing. In "Veil Of Time," there is really only one sex scene (though others touched on) when Maggie and Fergus come together for the first time. So no saxophones, but some confusion over leg wraps and dirks sheathed under the armpit and surprisingly stretchy modern underwear. I wanted to show in that scene that his expectations, coming from the 8thC, would be quite different from hers, being a modern somewhat damaged woman. Maybe I succeeded, maybe I didn't.
And then there is virtue in leaving something to the imagination. We won't go into Shades of Grey, because that isn't literature but something else - maybe a useful something else, as a pressure valve is useful to a pressure cooker, but not worthy of art. Some sex scenes I read are just too explicit and make you feel uncomfortable, like someone exposing themselves to you in an alley. I don't need to know how well a man is hung - it isn't going to change much about this intimate soul-bearing interaction between people. I certainly don't need to know about enormous mammary glands, God save us. Let the reader fill in the gaps - it's far more erotic anyway. Give hints.
In writing, this is the kind of balance we strive for. The author is a tight-rope walker between truth and suggestion. To be a writer is to be a conjurer. The magician shows you more by showing you less. The conjurer never lays everything out on the table, and certainly not the manual of how the trick is done.